


Eulogies

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: Tender Is the Night [4]
Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Anger, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood Drinking, Closure, Death Threats, Grief/Mourning, Humor, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Minor Character Death, Overstimulation, Past Child Abuse, Shower Sex, Trans Guillermo de la Cruz, Transphobia, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Wakes & Funerals, everybody's dad in this is basically a dick
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 20:20:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30094575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: “I need to go home, Nandor.”Nandor’s fingers freeze. “...Home?”“I’m not--leavingleaving. I just need to go home for a while.”“And why must you do this, if it’s not to beleavingleaving?”“My--” Guillermo’s hands fly up to play with the lopsided bow in the sateen cord tied there by Nandor. “I have some business to take care of.”“Your brother is sick,” Nandor surmises with a frown.“I have a sister. I’m the brother,” says Guillermo. “And Vanesa’s not sick. She’s--well, not fine, but as fine as she could be, I guess.”Nandor sighs. “I have not had my early evening blood, Guillermo. Less riddles, please.”“My father’s dead,” Guillermo says without preamble or missing a beat.--When Guillermo receives the news that his estranged father is dead and he must come home to make funeral arrangements, Nandor accompanies him to meet the family. Cue awkward encounters, clandestine sexy times and a whole shipload of guilt and anger that Guillermo has been avoiding dealing with until now. Can Nandor help him find closure?
Relationships: Guillermo de la Cruz/Nandor the Relentless
Series: Tender Is the Night [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125197
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	Eulogies

**Author's Note:**

> It's not necessary at all to read the other parts in this series to understand what's going on in this installment--just that Guillermo and Nandor are now in an established and committed relationship. However, if you are curious about more of Guillermo's coming out story and some of the recurring imagery that I circulate throughout this verse, then the previous part, Scars, would be a good place to start! Totally up to you.
> 
> I tried to be thorough with the tags, but there's no harm reiterating here, please head the content warnings. The content is basically scattered throughout the entire fic without specific beginning or ending lines, so if this isn't for you, please feel free to click away. Your safety comes first. <3
> 
> Theme song: ["The Wisp Sings" by Winter Aid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l2orzWG1qU)

Guillermo remembers the day he realized that his father didn’t love him.

He knows there are at least two things strange about the whole business of remembering this. The first strange thing is that the day Guillermo remembers seeing his father look at him like the first sunset of a colorblind man, is burned just as indelibly into his mind. It’s the in-between, really, the slide from worship to habit to indifference, that slipped Guillermo’s notice entirely.

The second strange thing about this remembering is that the day he realized his father didn’t love him, it was 2001 and Guillermo was eleven years old. Two years yet until he even came out to his father, because he’d never known he was stuck in a closet to begin with. No reason at all for his father to find fault with him and hate him for it.

In those days, Guillermo’s dark curls were in braided pigtails with the stretched-out purple elastics with cube-shaped lilac beads on them, and he still wore those gingham seersucker skorts and strappy white sandals with the rhinestones falling off that his mother loved to buy for him. He hadn’t the faintest idea yet that the very next month, he would be peeling away his underwear from the stickiness of his thighs and he would be submerging the cotton in the plugged-up bathroom sink and scrubbing away the first stains of lurid red with the raw of his knuckles. That that would be the beginnings of the monster inside him, clamoring to be called by its true name, _Guillermo, Guillermo_ , and that it would be following after him for the rest of his life.

Guillermo was six years old when he first realized his father loved him. It was half past three--it sticks out in Guillermo’s mind because he’s never had a very solid grasp on the concept of time, but that day his father was home early from work for the first time ever--and his father had lugged a brand new tricycle from the trunk of his car, deep purple, almost metallic, winking in the burn of the summer sun over their heads. Little Guillermo hopped on without the faintest clue how to ride the thing, but the bell on the handlebars made the most delightfully annoying sound ever and he rang it and rang it and rang it until his mother Silvia hollered good-naturedly from the kitchen window that the thing would run out of battery.

(It wasn’t battery-operated. But Guillermo didn’t know this, and he bit his lower lip in chastisement. His father took one look at him and his face split down the middle with the force of an unexpected laugh.)

Guillermo slouched against the handlebars, aiming for moody and not at all embarrassed. His father just kept laughing and laughing, and something dark behind his irises that Guillermo at that age could not understand began to clear away to make way for the unmistakable flame of worship.

“Mi corazón,” his father wheezed. “You’re too funny.” He looped the crook of his arm around Guillermo’s head in a noogie and he shook him, too forcefully, probably, but Memo latched onto the touch and the smell of his father’s sweat under his rolled-up cuffs and smiled.

Years later, after his parents had gone their separate ways and his father had wheeled his luggage out the door, Guillermo would be seated criss-cross on the emerald green carpet of the master bedroom trying to help Silvia sort through the piles of glossy photos that cascaded through their fingers. She’d pick one from the mess, a shot he’d never seen before of that day when he was six years old and pouting moodily on the handlebars of his new dragon-scale-purple tricycle while his father slapped his knee in mirth in the background, and she’d turn it over to read the date and the caption.

“Oh,” she’d say quietly. “Did you know that was the day he came home early because he got laid off from work?”

Guillermo wouldn’t know that. It wouldn’t make sense to him, even as the words, garbled and articulate at once, made their way through his ears to his brain. He wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of why and how his father could look at him like that on such a dark day in his life, and how he could think to stop by Walmart on his way home and load a brand new bike into the car to surprise his youngest kid with on the day they needed money most.

It became his favorite wound after that, the memory. He cradled it in his arms to his chest as he went to sleep on the days he could scarcely think of anything else except the way the icy edges of the crucifix turned sharp against his forehead as his father exorcised him on his knees in the carpeted hallway. Guillermo held the memory in his pocket walking to work, wondering how a single image of his father laughing because of something he’d said could hurt so exquisitely, so deliciously, when he’d decided that he no longer loved his father back.

It becomes his favorite wound all over again, fresh and throbbing and as inscrutable as the first day he tried to understand it, when Guillermo’s cell phone rings at five in the afternoon and he picks it up and it’s his sister Vanesa on the other end of the line with her voice stopped up like there’s cotton in her throat.

“Papi’s dead.”

\--

Guillermo is not there when Nandor arises from his coffin.

It’s becoming a more commonplace occurrence in the vampire household, considering that nowadays Nandor tends to fall asleep beside his ex-familiar in the too-soft bed in the blue room. Other times Guillermo comes and goes without a fixed schedule between night and day, and Nandor has come to expect the likelihood that he will be the one to push his coffin lid aside and scramble to his feet and rake his fingers through his own hair for a minute before exiting the crypt in discreet search of his human.

Nandor knows that Guillermo’s excursions that make him unreliable these days for waking time are likely connected to his vampire hunting. It’s still a thing they dance around--they can argue about chess and they can quibble, yes, about the dietary merits of artichokes, even make passing commentary on Nandor’s more stomach-churning exploits from his pillaging days--but Guillermo’s outings in the waning hours of afternoon sun are still not a subject they are ready to touch. One of these days, the things perched on the tip of Nandor’s tongue will spring out, and he’ll find the courage to finally ask Guillermo all the things he’s dying to know: is it an itch? Is it a thirst? Is it a thing that will ever be quenched, or is it merely the other side of the same immutable coin that binds them both?

So it does not surprise Nandor when he does not hear Guillermo’s heartbeat shuffling into the crypt the moment he creaks upward from his coffin. Most days, though, his human will come bustling through ten minutes later, flustered and making all sorts of pretense of scolding him for not waiting for him to help him up and comb his hair. Old habits die hard: particularly our favorite pretexts for fleeting and forbidden seconds of touch.

Still, Nandor tests the house with a tentative, “Guillermo?” with his voice just raised enough that it should not yet rouse Laszlo and Nadja who usually slumber well past sunset in their crypt.

The silence that drifts into his room in reply sets a rare chill scuttling over Nandor’s skin. He has jested a fair amount about Stephanie the witch telling him he may have the Sight, yes, but he does not particularly enjoy this feeling of omens when it is his human concerned.

“Guillermo,” Nandor tries again, even though he knows by now that his favorite beating heart is nowhere in the mansion.

He shrugs on a lounging cape and moves to the blue room. It is to think, he tells himself, because he’s not quite thirsty enough yet for his first evening cup of blood--even though the lovesick fool in him knows he’s waiting for Guillermo. Sinking into the pillowy folds of the mattress that by now no longer smell like the nineteenth-century must of the house, but more like the salt and earth and wrapping paper of Guillermo’s clothes and hair and skin, Nandor deigns to consider the swoop he gets in his stomach when he pauses to remember that his ex-familiar could be out there whirling in a deadly dance of stakes with lethal creatures of the night. He leans back against the cushions to shake the thought from him. Only then does it occur to him that the bed is entirely unmade.

That makes him knit his brows in consternation. Guillermo has previously slept in the blue room before going out to stab vampires, yes, but never has he left a bedcover untucked.

Nandor is just about to bolt to his feet and tear through the grounds around the house for Guillermo--in the most dignified and vampirely of manners, of course--when the front door clicks open and Guillermo’s boots thud against the floorboards.

The demand “Where have you been?” is out of Nandor’s lips before he can help himself.

There’s no answer. Not even any rustle or movement, save the telltale uptick in Guillermo’s heartbeat as he pauses on his feet in the foyer.

Then Guillermo’s house keys tinkle against the corner of the console, and he plods the few feet to the entrance of the blue room, and he rounds the corner of the doorway and Nandor thinks immediately that he looks like hell.

Nandor stands and crosses the distance between them. The top button of Guillermo’s collar is undone. Nandor has his hands loosely intertwined in front of him. It takes a Herculean effort to make his fingers move, but something tells him that his human needs this. That the sight of Guillermo rooted to the floor in absolute motionlessness is quite possibly one of the most unnatural and unsettling things Nandor has seen in him yet.

He unties the twisted sateen cord of his lounging cape and drapes the wool around Guillermo’s shoulders. Guillermo doesn’t react, save for the infinitesimal quirk of the corner of his brow. Nandor lifts his gaze briefly to tangle with Guillermo’s and lowers it back down again to concentrate on tying a loose bow across his chest.

“Guillermo,” Nandor speaks again. Softer this time. “Where have you been?”

The words rush out of Guillermo then like all he’s been waiting for is for the vampire to trigger the dam inside him. “I need to go home, Nandor.”

Nandor’s fingers freeze. “...Home?”

It’s a testament to how far they’ve come that the mere lilt in which Nandor speaks that one word makes Guillermo’s eyes snap up to meet his, and Guillermo softens for the first time, starts to come back to himself, become human again. “I’m not-- _leaving_ leaving. I just need to go home for a while.”

“And why must you do this, if it’s not to be _leaving_ leaving?”

“My--” Guillermo’s hands fly up to play with the lopsided bow in the sateen cord tied there by Nandor. “I have some business to take care of.”

“Your brother is sick,” Nandor surmises with a frown.

“I have a sister. I’m the brother,” says Guillermo. “And Vanesa’s not sick. She’s--well, not fine, but as fine as she could be, I guess.”

Nandor sighs. “I have not had my early evening blood, Guillermo. Less riddles, please.”

“My father’s dead,” Guillermo says without preamble or missing a beat. Without stopping to consider the weight of all that is tumbling out of him, either, apparently, because then he’s moving away from Nandor toward the bed to yank the sheets and duvet up into place and retrieve a notebook from his nightstand and reach under the bed for his empty suitcase.

It takes a minute for Nandor to unstick himself from his place on the floorboards. He swivels to look at Guillermo, a paradox of movement in comparison to the deathly stillness in his face from just a moment before: all quotidian bustling at odds with the chill of foreboding that gripped Nandor just before Guillermo’s return to the house.

Nandor is not eloquent, not in situations where it really matters. By now, eleven years and counting into whatever this is between them, both of them know this. So it comes as no surprise when the first thing Nandor can think of in reaction to the bombshell is, “But your father is very young, yes? Only thirty-something years old?”

Guillermo pauses in his bedmaking to look at him with that particular quirk in his left eyebrow. “ _I’m_ thirty years old, Nandor. My dad is in his fifties.” He bites his lip. “ _Was_ in his fifties. Pretty young, yeah. I guess.”

Nandor wonders if it’s insensitive to ask how Guillermo’s father died. He imagines it must have been of supernatural means, what with Guillermo’s Van Helsing heritage and his near brushes with supernaturally induced death himself. Among vampire society, such gory details are par for the course in every rare conversation of passing, but Nandor has rather forgotten the customs of humans about these things.

Guillermo squints up at him. A little breath like a sigh leaves him. Does he know what Nandor is thinking? The vampire rather loathes that, and decides to clear his mind of all thoughts immediately.

“I don't even know where your home is,” says Nandor.

“I meant my mom’s home. My bad,” Guillermo says. It sounds halfway like an apology. Nandor doesn’t have the time to stop and consider what Guillermo might be apologizing for. “She’s local, actually. I shouldn’t be gone very long. I just need to take care of…” He trails off, sounding an awful lot like he wants to say _shit_ , but thinks better of it and ends with, “...the funeral. And making sure my mom’s okay.” As he speaks, he bends down to pick up a rumpled sweater off the floor and shake it out, and he gestures roundly in Nandor’s direction.

“Do not forget to pack my things before you leave, then,” Nandor decides. “I am coming with you.”

Guillermo’s eyes widen inexplicably to the size of sauces. “Oh, no, no, mas--Nandor, that’s--really not necessary.”

\--

As it turns out, Nandor the Relentless coming along with Guillermo to his mother’s abode on the other side of Staten Island to preside over funeral arrangements which he hasn’t the slightest clue how to approach in the first place, is very much necessary. Guillermo realizes this as somehow he ends up boarding the bus long after nightfall rather than at midafternoon as he’d originally planned, and this time with a pale, uncertain giant of a spectacle in a manbun and a leather waistcoat trailing after him.

Some part of Guillermo expected Vanesa to be the one to open the door to the apartment. He already knows from his phone call with his sister that she’s been there with their mother, holding down the fort. But he should never have expected any less of Silvia de la Cruz, who lifts herself up off the couch and undoes the four deadbolts in the front door and opens it wide to present herself to her son, quivering in infinitesimal ways and looking somehow small for the first time in her life all swathed in a pilling woolen cardigan that falls to her knees, but as steely to the core as ever.

“Mijo,” she says. “It’s been forever.”

Guillermo hears twins of accusation and relief at once in her voice. He goes to her, arms open, to be folded against her body before she even finishes speaking. The duffle bag he has across his stomach crushes awkwardly between them as she presses him close to her chest. There’s something unfamiliar about the smell of her, something more than the scent of paper and wild winter bushes and cooking oil that he can’t place. It’s all he can do to force his thoughts away from the scent, too, of the guilt at his absence, that he can no longer place her because he was never there to witness this foreignness growing about her.

They pull away after what feels like a heavy minute. It isn’t lost on Guillermo that Silvia is the first to stand back and pull herself together.

“Um,” her son says. “Hi.” He laughs a little. It feels more comfortable that way. Then he says again, complete with an idiotic little hand wave, “Hi, Mami.”

The door opens wider, and Vanesa’s braided head pops out. Somehow the movement reminds Guillermo of his manners, and he gestures behind him at Nandor who has been standing still and silent on the doorstep. “Ma, Nesa, this is, um, Nandor. My--boss.” He can’t help ducking his head at the end at the half-lie.

Over the top of Silvia’s head, Vanesa’s eyes widen in Guillermo’s direction, like _What the fuck? Why is your boss here?_ To which Guillermo gives a helpless little shake of his head and widens his eyes back, communicating _I don’t fucking know, he wouldn’t take no for an answer_ , or something along those lines back at his sister. She jerks her head subtly to the side. Guillermo furrows his brows back at her and returns an irritated shrug. _Seriously? Not in front of them both_.

“Hi,” Vanesa says over Silvia’s head to Nandor, stretching out her vowels in her well-practiced retail voice from her high school days. “Really nice to meet you, Nandor. Come in, come in. We’ve got some leftovers out from dinner.”

If there were a camera present, Guillermo would a thousand percent be sharing a devious little look with the lens right now. Get your sister to unconsciously invite your vampire boyfriend over the threshold of your home purely through the art of eyebrow-wagging, shoulder-shrugging and sibling telepathy? Check.

“Thank you, that is very kind,” Nandor says even as he steps inside with an admirable grimace on his face.

“Oh, no, you don’t have to--it’s fine. Nandor’s got, uh, he’s got a liquid diet,” Guillermo rushes to clarify, as Vanesa grabs a baking sheet of half-finished cookies off the counter and plonks it down on the coffee table. Looks like she’s been back to stress baking in the last twenty-four hours, and for good reason.

Something in Silvia seems to have stiffened ever so slightly in the last several seconds of this exchange, but if she is offended by Memo bringing home a stranger on such a night as this, she masks it masterfully. She slides on one of her favorite smiles, the kind that speaks of hospitality and control, and she plops herself down into the armchair adjacent to where Guillermo is perched awkwardly on the edge of the loveseat and she shoves a hand between her thighs and begins to speak.

“It’s very nice of you to come visit with Memo,” she begins. “We’ve heard some things, a little bit, about you. What is it you do, again?”

Guillermo can definitely tell now by the tinge of her voice that he’s getting a half-stern, half-tragic talk later on why he brought a buffer with him. Come to think of it, he now begins to question his own motives for caving to Nandor’s self-invitation. He knows if he tried hard enough, he could have convinced even his imperious and at times whiny ex-employer that this was a trip he could only take alone.

“Oh, a bit of this and that,” Nandor answers with a vague wave of his hand, at the precise moment that Guillermo blurts out, “He runs a funeral home.”

He could slap himself right now. He could really, genuinely grab the baking sheet off the coffee table and slap himself squarely in the forehead right now.

Silvia’s brows shoot up toward her hairline. Something like understanding and forgiveness starts to fill her visage. “Oh! Oh. Memo, do you think your boss could--”

“Nope,” he says.

“You don’t even know what--”

“No. Sorry. He’s--he’s actually putting the business on hold for a little bit.” Guillermo coughs into his fist, just knowing from the heat blooming in his cheeks how rapidly the telltale flush is spreading through his body. “He’s in mourning, actually.”

“I am?” says Nandor.

Vanesa chooses this moment to return from the kitchen to the living room with open cans of coconut water and straws in her hands. Nandor takes one look at the human drinks and gulps.

“Yes, I am,” Nandor affirms.

Scratch slapping himself with a cookie sheet. If Guillermo could vaporize himself out of this situation with his own holy water right now, he would. 

“Many people have died,” Nandor goes on, baring the tips of his fangs as he is wont to do when he is demonstrating the most solemn of faces. “Many, many people. Right before my eyes. It is definitely something that gets to you, you know.”

Oh, Guillermo knows. He definitely fucking knows.

“I’m sure it must,” Vanesa offers in sympathy. She proffers one of the cans to Nandor. “Coconut water?”

“I’ll--I’ll be taking that, thank you,” Guillermo says, snatching the can straight from Vanesa’s hand and taking a deep, gurgling draught of panic through the straw.

“But--liquid diet?” Vanesa says, half-confused, half-accusatory.

“It’s a special kind of liquid diet. He’s got...conditions and stuff,” says Guillermo.

“I do?” says Nandor from the side of his mouth.

“And I have his nutritional supplements right here,” Guillermo goes on, speaking around a furious gurgle at the straw, and patting the top of the duffle bag in his lap.

“You have?” Nandor says.

“Later, Nandor,” Guillermo hisses back.

“That must be why he’s looking kind of pale,” says Vanesa contemplatively.

“Mija!” Silvia admonishes her.

“Oh my God, I’m just kidding, Mami.”

Guillermo interrupts this definitely not awkward and definitely not spiraling conversation by slamming his empty coconut water can a little more harshly than intended on the corner of the coffee table. He slaps his knees and smears on a smile that looks more like a grimace. “So. When’s the--when’s the thing?”

“Uh, yeah, we gotta talk about that. I got a date finalized from Father Javier, and it looks like it’s the day after tomorrow. But you need to help me make some more phone calls tomorrow when it’s business hours again,” says Vanesa pragmatically. “I still need to take an early shift and I don’t know when my boss will let me get off if Ciara skips again.”

The unspoken message is pretty clear: _I’m glad you’re here, Memo, my favorite little shithead, but you gotta start pulling your weight around here and helping me out with Mami._

“So tell him your dad died,” Guillermo says. “Why is he gonna make you stay late if your dad just passed away? Who the hell cares about Ciara?”

“ _Memo_ ,” Silvia says. “Vanesa.” She glances back at Vanesa with a warning crackling between them. Thirty-odd years of raising her eldest daughter has taught her when to recognize the spark rising dangerously to the candle in her eyes. 

But Guillermo’s sister will not be stopped. Fist denting the can in her hand, flint in her voice and her irises, she says, “He’s _your_ dad too, you know.”

Guillermo taught himself long ago not to hurt anymore. Not to let sight or memory of any part of his family have the power to sting in the center of his chest again. But he never was able to fully let go of whatever tattered relationship he has now with Vanesa, his once best friend in the whole wide world. And so he rocks back slack-jawed against the cushions of the loveseat, staring up at her, stunned.

Vanesa heaves a single breath and then jackknifes from the chair to her feet and exits down the hallway. Seconds later, the bedroom door that gets perpetually stuck in the jamb slams and bounces off the lintel, off-beat: an anticlimactic note of finality to the conversation.

\--

There's only so much time that can be dedicated to a dramatic exit like Vanesa's in such a tiny apartment as this. About an hour later, after chatting about this and that to smooth over what she is sure was the most embarrassing display of dirty laundry to Guillermo's boss, Silvia rolls herself onto her feet from her armchair and announces that their guest shall have the bedroom. Nandor looks nonplussed for a moment at the declaration, until Guillermo exchanges a look with him and the vampire suddenly remembers that bizarre trait of humans where they actually sleep during the night.

"No, Mami, you should take the bed," Guillermo insists. "You've had a really long day. You deserve the rest."

A shuffle at the periphery of his awareness alerts him to Vanesa's quiet re-entrance to the living room. She pauses where the corner of the hallway drops off, her arms wrapped around herself like an afterthought, and it's clear from the layers sticking out of one of her french braids on the side of her head that she's been napping on and off in that discomfited sort of way that never succeeds in loosening the tension in her limbs.

"Come to bed, Mami," Vanesa says. To Guillermo, the agreement almost sounds like a tacit step halfway to an apology. But he knows it will take far more than a miniscule gesture like this to start chipping at the stone wall piling up between them.

Lips pressed into a thin line, Silvia finally relents and loops her arm around Vanesa’s proffered elbow, and the two shuffle back down the hallway in the direction of the single bedroom.

“Well, that is very convenient, because I don’t know what we would have done with a bed, anyway,” Nandor observes in that off-beat, accented rhythm of his that never fails to make a tiny smile flit to Guillermo’s face at the timing of it all.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe would’ve slept in it,” Guillermo says around his little grin.

Nandor bares his teeth. “It is barely eleven o’clock, Guillermo. Who even does that?”

Guillermo gives in to a soft laugh. He knows the vampire is purposely tossing around the pretense of idiocy for his benefit: to lighten the mood. Sometimes Guillermo can’t believe he ever missed it before, especially considering how he always hung on his master’s every word, but ever since they got together he has suddenly begun to understand the motivation behind more of Nandor’s outwardly bizarre behavior.

Nandor leans over to pat Guillermo’s knee. Guillermo takes half a second to marvel at the fact that there is no hesitation to the gesture. “Well, you should sleep,” says the vampire. “I will be back later.”

“I can’t sleep, Nandor. We literally have the same sleep schedule.” Guillermo stops in the middle of his eyeroll to backtrack. “Wait--where are you going?”

Nandor is already up on his feet. If he were wearing his typical cape right now, it would have settled in a heavy wave of wool and crushed silk with his movement. “To eat, of course.”

“There’s no need to do that, mas--Nandor. As I said...I have all your stuff right here.” Guillermo unzips the duffel bag in his lap for the first time and rifles around in it until his hand lands on the gallon-sized ziplock of blood bags at the bottom. He wiggles one in the air.

Nandor is quick to suppress the bare-fanged look of distaste on his face, but not before his human catches it. Guillermo knows how much blood bags make him lose his appetite, as opposed to fresh flow from live victims. Still, they have no choice in this situation, and Guillermo knows that Nandor knows that. He also appreciates that the vampire is (barely) reining in his usual whining complaints.

Nandor takes the proffered blood bag without further comment and simply turns it over in his palm. He waves his free hand in Guillermo’s direction. “Sleep.”

“I’ve literally never been more awake.”

Nandor huffs and waves his hand again more insistently. “ _Sleeeeeep_...or I will compel you to lay your head on that pillow with the dark powers of my--”

“Nandor,” Guillermo says, half fondness, half exasperation. “When has your hypnosis ever worked on me?”

Nandor lowers his hand like a guilty child. “There is nothing wrong with my hypnosis. It worked on the mailman last week.”

Guillermo looks at him. “Oh my f--for fuck’s sake, Nandor. Is that why I haven’t been getting my federal refund in the mail?” He glances around, lowers his voice to shrill whisper. “Did you _eat_ him?!”

“No, no, no, his blood smelled too sad and pitiful to even tempt my appetite. He fell into one of those holes of yours in the yard that sink, and he was screaming so much from the sound of the bones, and it was creating a very inconvenient racket on the street. I had to stop him or else everyone would come out and see what was going on.”

Right. Okay. Guillermo has enough years of experience under his belt dealing with Nandor’s...Nandorisms to know that it’s best to let the conversation lie. “Fine. I’ll go take a shower, and then maybe I’ll be a little sleepy. Whatever.”

Guillermo half expects Nandor to indicate his acquiescence and then disappear out the front door to hunt anyway, since the blood bag is so disagreeable to him, but instead the vampire makes as if to gather up the skirts of his cape--old habits die hard--and plops back down onto the couch.

Guillermo lifts a brow at him. “Oh, so now you’re going to make sure that I shower and go to sleep?”

“Precisely,” Nandor says beatifically.

Guillermo presses his mouth into a line. It isn’t lost on him at a time like this that the gesture is something he’s picked up from his mother and never let go of.

Nandor breaks the awkward silence. “You are to be living with your mother and sister for some time, yes? To take care of the burial rites for your father? It would not be wise for you to be so tired all the time when they need you.”

Damn Nandor for being right. Reluctantly Guillermo sinks back down onto the couch next to his vampire.

“And also, you will need the energy to be thinking of your eulogy,” Nandor points out.

The full implication of that statement doesn’t hit Guillermo for a second. When it does, he almost gives a full-body flinch. “Eulogy,” he groans. “Fucking…”

Nandor sets down the blood bag quickly, balanced on the round of his knee, and pats the sweaty crown of Guillermo’s curls. “There, there...yes...I know it’s hard...when I had to say some parting words over my John before he became a meal, my throat closed up and I could hardly speak…”

An incredulous, crazed little laugh escapes Guillermo at the realization that Nandor must think he loves his father the way the vampire loved his loyal steed.

Love--love. Well, maybe there’s not so much untruth to the word as Guillermo would like to think, but going down that path is complicated and full of hidden brambles. Guillermo de la Cruz avoids complicated paths full of hidden brambles. He avoids considerations of moral forests altogether, really.

“I can’t write a eulogy,” Guillermo moans with his head in his hands.

“Yes, you can, Guillermo. I have seen that strongly worded letter about the cucumber salads that you slipped under the door of Colin Robinson’s room. Let me find you a pen and paper, and you can--”

“I can’t write the eulogy _now_ ,” Guillermo stresses, “and besides, Colin Robinson was different. He was literally bringing home his coworkers’ rotten cucumber salad and sticking it in the fridge to annoy the shit out of me.”

Nandor’s hand falls limp on top of Guillermo’s hair, as if to mirror his defeat as he sits there beside his human, at a loss for words. The air practically shivers with tension as the vampire, for the first time, makes a floundering effort to comfort Guillermo meaningfully. “Well, then. What...can I… _do_ for you?”

Guillermo entertains the briefest of smiles in the privacy of his hands before straightening to face Nandor. He finds that the vampire has already been looking directly at him. Burned by the eye contact, Nandor’s gaze swerves sideways for a moment, but it soon drifts back to settle on his face again. Guillermo’s lips part in silence. Nandor seems oblivious, so wrapped up in his earnestness to do something, that he doesn’t react when Guillermo’s body tips sideways till their shoulders push against each other. The shift in position causes Nandor’s hand to slip from his curls to the wrinkle of knit wool at the side of Guillermo’s stomach. Guillermo nestles his head in the crook of Nandor’s shoulder, ignoring the bite of the zipper on his leather jacket, and presses the tip of his nose into the cool flesh of his neck in that soft and surprising way that Nandor has done for him so many times.

Only then does Nandor stir, to bring Guillermo closer to him, till his human is tucked into his side. Guillermo takes the movement as an invitation to part his lips again and press a slow, open-mouthed kiss on the side of Nandor’s neck just below the ridges of his scar.

Nandor stiffens. Guillermo barely pauses, a bit slow on the uptick, but then Nandor’s other hand lands on his knee and Guillermo gets the message. He pulls back a fraction. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Nandor bites out. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, no I’m--I’m okay if you’re okay. Are _you_ okay?”

“I will be okay when _you_ are okay.”

“Right. Okay. Um.” Guillermo sits up straighter, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose, accepting the moment as broken. He takes the tiniest bit of comfort in the fact that at least Nandor’s hand hasn’t uncurled yet from the folds of his sweater. “Nandor, what’s going on?”

“We are not doing that here. Not in your house,” Nandor says simply.

Guillermo’s mouth falls open slightly in offense. It’s not like he was thinking of _jumping_ Nandor in the middle of Silvia’s apartment, surrounded by--okay, maybe he was thinking of jumping Nandor a little. But he doesn’t understand why Nandor is being picky about location all of a sudden, and he tells him as such.

Nandor pulls back just far enough to look him in the eye. He speaks gravely, “You are grieving, Guillermo. I am not the sort of vampire to pillage you when you are clouded by rage and tears over your loss.”

Guillermo purses his lips with a silent _well thanks a lot, fucking chivalry_.

“I’m not--” Guillermo heaves a sigh, stops midway and then decides it’s probably not worth it to get bogged down in all the details now, anyway. “You know what? It’s fine. I’m probably not really in the mood, anyway. It was...thanks for sitting here with me. And, um. Sorry.” Guillermo twists his hands together in his lap and shoves them between his thighs. “Y’know, about kissing you there.”

Nandor regards him with an unfathomable look of searching in his dark eyes. Finally his hand drops from the side of Guillermo’s stomach, but not without a final fleeting caress. He starts to get up. “Okay. Okay, Guillermo. You can go take your shower, and I will go out hunting. You can sleep or you cannot sleep--I will not stop you.”

“Okay,” says Guillermo, still a little stunned from everything.

“Okay,” says Nandor.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“You could just drink some of my blood, you know.”

Nandor pauses mid-stride to the front door. He closes his eyes, hands curling momentarily into fists at his sides with a ripple of veins beneath his skin, and then he turns back slowly to Guillermo. “What?”

Guillermo goes to unbutton his shirt, but then decides the theatrics are a bit much for now. He rolls back the cuffs of his sweater and shirt instead to bare his wrist. He holds it out to Nandor. “Here.”

Nandor balks. “Is that what you want?”

“You’re hungry and tired, Nandor. Don’t be an idiot.” Guillermo presses his mouth closed out of reflex after the insolent retort, but the vampire hardly reacts.

“Is it what _you_ want?” he repeats.

“I don’t know what the heck is wrong with you tonight,” Guillermo bursts out. He jerks the hem of his cuff back down over his wrist. “Fine. Okay. Fine. Go out hunting. I’ll go take my shower and I’ll go to bed like a good little familiar because you said so. Bye, Nandor.” He stands up and stalks down the hallway to the bathroom and just barely refrains from slamming the door.

He knows he’s being childish. But he’s lived with this well of anger inside him for so long, this barely acknowledged pit of something rotten and seething deep within him, and sometimes it all comes gushing out because Nandor’s stubbornness utterly confounds him.

\--

He doesn’t actually take a shower right there and then. He waits, head pressed halfway against the door as he sits with his knees up and the bare soles of his feet flat against the cold tile, until he hears the double click of the front door closing and he knows for sure that Nandor is gone.

On the other side of the cellophane-thin bathroom wall, Guillermo hears the light puff of his mother’s nighttime breathing and the answering snore from Vanesa who sleeps at her side. He can picture her, limbs koala’ed around their mother just like how she used to cling to Memo like an octopus when they shared a bed together. Somehow, the parallelism almost stings.

Guillermo shakes his head to rid himself once again of the murky forests lurking there, and he pulls out his phone from his pocket and opens up to the notes app to start typing this damn eulogy.

\--

Guillermo remembers the time he stayed over at Patrick Dunman's house after class to finish their history diorama and when Silvia found out, she bent him over the bed and belted him fifteen times and he pissed himself so bad that it trickled down his leg and stained his uniform tights permanently.

He couldn't understand why hanging out with Patrick was bad. Why it was such a big deal for two eleven-year-olds. Not even when she cried at him that it was bad, it looked bad, it looked so bad, and she said she was sorry but it had to be done so he'd learn his lesson. All Guillermo knew at that moment was that he wished, violently, that his mother were dead.

It tasted irrevocable, in a way. Like he'd lost some kind of dark metaphorical virginity by thinking that thought.

He told himself he would never forgive her for this, not until she died, not for the way she dragged him to the bedroom without letting him speak a word in his defense, and she pointed at the mattress where he was to brace himself without looking up while she rooted around in the closet for his father's belt.

He made up a eulogy for her in his head. In his imagining, he was just barely tall enough to peep out over the pulpit, and the priest adjusted the mic for him to speak. He spoke from a scrap of paper because that's what people always did at eulogies in the movies. He talked about how he forgave his mother for everything, and he loved her, and he wished they'd had more time together and he wanted her back.

He thought those were the things that were said at all the funerals. He was good at that sort of thing: fucking up, and learning what he was and wasn't supposed to be, and memorizing the new script to perfection. Until he no longer knew how to read the script at all.

\--

Silvia never hit him again after that. Guillermo wonders sometimes, when he’s feeling strong enough to reflect on his past, if the guilt of those fifteen strokes was too much for her. Sometimes he would glance up at the dinner table and find his mother already staring at him over the rim of her lemon-and-strawberry-painted mug, keen and deeply anchored somewhere he couldn't reach, and he would feel that maybe she was seeing in him that little kid that slipped into the deep end of the pool so many years ago and almost drowned.

(She never knew he had jumped. No one knew that, except maybe Vanesa, because she just knew things. But Guillermo knew there were things you didn’t let even your mother know, and after the day she punished him for being with Patrick Dunman, he knew for sure that there were things he would keep close to his chest forever.)

Other times it would happen again at the dinner table, and Guillermo would see this time in her eyes that she seemed to be swimming somewhere else that tasted like the guilt of the air in the hours immediately following the Patrick Dunman incident.

And then other times when he’s alone, in silence, Guillermo takes to wondering if his mother even remembers the incident at all.

\--

Guillermo doesn’t even begin to start listing all the fake things or all the true things he could say at his father’s eulogy, before his hand starts to go numb from the sheer effort of keeping it from shaking. He sets his phone down on the tiled floor and thumps his head back against the door. Then he loosens himself from the little ball he’s created around his knees, and he gets up and starts stripping and steps into the shower.

He imagines his mother snorts and comes back to consciousness, briefly, at the familiar screech of the handle when he tugs it. Then the water gushes out and splashes his toes with ice--he’d forgotten for a moment how far back to stand in the apartment shower so he didn’t have to suffer from the touch of the cold water--and the sound fills the bathroom with a low, humming echo and he’s lost to the rest of the world.

The bathroom steams up quickly from how high he’s cranked the heat. He runs his fingers through his hair almost with a vengeance, tugging the cheap shampoo through, as if hurting himself simultaneously with the burn on his skin and the flinch in his scalp could begin to make him atone for whatever the fuck was that mess with Nandor tonight. Let alone everything else he’s leaving untouched in the padlocked trunk of his memories of his father and mother and--his entire family, really. He thought he could handle coming home. He thought he could handle a couple phone calls to the parish and a couple arrangements to get the funeral up and going. The awkward joke with his mother and sister over a batch of cookies. Some fast and loose lies about his exact relationship with his goth-looking boss who tagged along.

It turns out, just as he always does, that he’s severely overestimated himself and forgotten all about the power of his twin guilt and anger complexes.

A particularly jerky yank of his fingers through his curls sends globs of lather splashing against the glass door of the shower. He turns his head to glare through the rivulets streaming down his face at the offending bit of white shampoo, and then he rinses his right hand under the stream and uses it to swipe away the bubbles from the glass.

He just barely bites back a cry when he finds the blurry, refracted form of Nandor’s face staring through the glass back at him.

Nandor’s leather jacket is nowhere to be found. Guillermo’s weak eyes, bereft of their glasses, can just barely discern with a glance downward that the buttons of Nandor’s vest are undone.

Neither of them speak for what can’t conceivably be more than a few seconds, but to them feels like an eternity. Guillermo stands there under the hot spray of the shower, feeling idiotic and incredibly horny at the same time, and he lets the water rinse the rest of the bubbles from his hair and plaster the strands against the side of his face as he stands there, eye to eye with the vampire through the flimsy barrier, with his hands limp at his sides.

Never breaking eye contact, Nandor undoes the last button on his vest, slips it from his shoulders and lets it drop to the floor. He then tugs at the laces of his trousers and slowly, tortuously, sheds them beside the vest on the tiles below. Guillermo looks, and he gulps.

The door grates then as Nandor slides it open. Guillermo barely spares a thought to who might be awakened on the other side of the wall. His heart thumps unevenly, instead, as his sight clears from the ghosting of the steam to the ceiling and he can now see that Nandor’s shirt, too, is entirely unbuttoned to reveal his dark chest hair. Below the hem of his shirt, there is no mistaking that Nandor is rock hard.

Nandor steps in with a characteristic and deadly grace. Immediately he is hit by the spray of the shower that shoots away from Guillermo’s head, and the water beads up in a mist of fine droplets across the black strands that frame his face. He moves closer. Picks up the bar of soap on the ledge that Guillermo hasn’t yet touched, and brings it forward under the stream of water to wet it, and instantly the bell of his loose-sleeved shirt is drenched. 

Nandor pays no heed. He strokes a hand over the bar of soap a few times and lays his fingers slowly, deliberately, over the round of Guillermo’s right shoulder. Guillermo both flinches and relaxes into the cool touch.

Nandor works his skin with his fingers, rubbing the pad of his thumb into a knot in the muscle there that Guillermo wasn’t even aware of. He wets his hand again with the soap bar and lathers the shoulder once more, moves higher and higher, until his fingertips brush against the flesh of Guillermo’s neck. The human shudders and arches backward before he can control himself.

There’s a thump as Nandor replaces the soap bar on the ledge. He continues his ministrations this time with both hands. Guillermo leans further back into the massage, feels that this is right and natural and everything he’s never dreamed of but has needed all his life.

Nandor’s hands move higher and higher until they’re no longer at his shoulders. They caress the sides of his neck like the ghost of a breath, barely there, and it’s all Guillermo can do not to let a moan escape him or reach down and touch himself.

The water cascades over him and the lather sweeps away into the drain. Hot rivers keep streaming down Guillermo’s neck. He doesn’t know when he tilted his head ever so slightly to the side, but he becomes aware of it when suddenly Nandor’s body closes the gap between them and presses flush against his backside, every square inch of them touching each other. He fails to suppress a gasp at the feeling of Nandor's cock that nudges him and ruts a little against Guillermo’s ass. The instinctive part of him pauses a second and wants to pull away and say, _Wait, your shirt'll get soaked straight through_ , but he shuts off Guillermo the Familiar and simply leans back with his eyelids shuttered against the building pleasure.

Nandor’s right hand falls away for a moment. Then it returns, just the barest tip of his pointer finger, to stroke a wandering line with his nail down the column of Guillermo’s bared neck.

“I thought you went hunting,” Guillermo whispers behind closed lids. Too low for anyone but Nandor’s ears to hear.

Nandor doesn’t answer. His nose touches Guillermo’s neck, instead, and the human stands there wondering if his silence means that he didn’t find anyone to eat, or if he never went out with the intention to hunt after all.

Nandor opens his mouth then and licks a cool stripe up the skin over Guillermo’s jugular. Something primal in Guillermo rears up in both fear and ecstasy, and it’s a jolt of pure pleasure through his entire body. His hand flies up to latch onto Nandor’s left arm where it slipped over his chest to keep him steady, locked in place, caged, even.

Guillermo swallows. He enjoys how the bob makes his flesh ripple closer to the barely discernible pressure of Nandor’s fangs hovering over his neck.

“Bite me, Nandor,” he says. “Drink.”

The razor edge of the vampire’s fangs nicks into the surface of Guillermo’s skin. There’s only a moment’s pause, and then Nandor wraps both arms firmly around Guillermo’s belly and chest, Guillermo hanging on as if for dear life, and the vampire adjusts his angle and sinks his teeth home into the vein. 

Guillermo’s mouth falls open in a gasp. He tenses, unable to help himself, as pain lances through him from the bite. His knees go weak and he rocks back on his heels, supported only by the solid weight of Nandor's unyielding body behind him.

Nandor's fangs sink deeper and deeper. His tongue laps at the skin behind the wound where they are locked together. Guillermo whimpers, almost wants to cry from the stimulation. He's already wet just standing like this between the pressure of the shower slamming into his chest and Nandor's teeth in his flesh and his body unmoving behind him, around him, everywhere under his fingertips and in his senses. At the sounds of arousal that escape Guillermo, something rumbles in Nandor's throat. He moves his left hand up to cup Guillermo's jaw--gently at first--and then tightens it in a vise grip there until the human lets out a quiet yelp and yields, baring his already naked neck even further to the mercy of the vampire.

 _Touch me, touch me_ , Guillermo pleads in his mind.

He's torn between the sensation of Nandor shifting just enough to let a droplet of blood trickle hotly down Guillermo's clavicle, and his right hand snaking down Guillermo's arm, tracing the curve of his stomach, dipping along his hipbone, and combing through his patch of pubic hair. Guillermo barely holds back a sob. He comes so easily undone in Nandor's hands, nearly comes without even being touched there, turned on by the sole sensation of icy, monstrous knives lodged in his neck.

Nandor slips his hand under Guillermo's thigh and hoists it up. Guillermo understands and, with minimal fumbling, finds purchase against the edge of the tub and the door track to brace himself. The position feels so very open and vulnerable. A thrill of terror and heightened arousal shoots through Guillermo.

Nandor sucks lazily but insistently at his blood. At the same time, his hand returns to Guillermo's soaking entrance and he pushes two fingers in without preamble. Guillermo practically bucks, but Nandor hisses against his neck in reproach and tightens his grip on his jaw, enough to hurt just on the edge of ecstasy.

Nandor pushes in slowly, scissoring his fingers just slightly, but at this angle every little movement of his fingers feels a hundred times more sensitive to Guillermo. Nandor pauses, pulls back--pushes back in and out and in again, more insistently each time. Then he twists his wrist as he pushes in and scissors his fingers again and stops completely, seeming to relish the way Guillermo's entire body shudders from the effort of holding his thighs apart against the pleasure and his throat flutters with his gulp for air.

Some distant part of Guillermo is questioning Nandor's wildly inhuman self-control. He feels like nothing more than a prey, caught between the jaws and talons of his predator, quivering and helpless at the mercy of the vampire who toys with him, enjoys watching his pleasure and suffering meld together. Nandor suckles almost gently at his neck again, and if it's at all possible, Guillermo feels himself grow even wetter around Nandor's hand.

 _Please, please move_ , Guillermo pleads, but he's incapable of making a sound.

Finally Nandor's hand moves again. He fucks into Guillermo with more purpose, seeming to sink deeper each time. He crooks his fingers--searching for something--and when his human arches with a gasp, Nandor growls against his neck in triumph and fucks him harder against that spot until Guillermo's knees are quaking.

Again and again Nandor edges him. He speeds up the thrusting of his fingers until Guillermo finds himself rocking back on his hand, just on the lip of the precipice, and then Nandor slows down again to massage his walls in a maddening crawl. Guillermo's face is awash with tears from the stimulation. He's sure of it even though every inch of his body is already dripping with shower water. The slow leeching of his blood from his neck is finally starting to nudge his consciousness into lightheadedness. Nandor must sense this, because he retracts his fangs from the twin puncture wounds in his flesh just far enough to be able to lap up the drops that ooze out with his tongue. At the same time, he renews his grip on Guillermo's jaw with his one hand and with the other fucks his human straight into climax.

Guillermo is beyond articulation as three fingers invade him and stroke every last centimeter of his insides. He's voiceless, teetering on the brink, and as Nandor speeds up the pace of his fingerfucking, Guillermo spills over the edge with a quiet sob of ecstasy. He wants to cry out his vampire's name, _Nandor, Nandor_ , but pleasure has ripped his voice straight from his throat.

Guillermo orgasms, soaking, around Nandor's hand. He half expects Nandor to slow down and let him catch a breath as he comes down from his high, but the vampire doesn't spare him a moment. He keeps fucking into him until Guillermo's legs tremble and his vision begins to swirl. Then he detaches himself completely from his human's neck, withdraws his hand to loop under Guillermo's raised thigh and hoists it up himself, and orders, sounding just as hoarse as Guillermo feels: "Brace your hands against the wall."

Guillermo knows what comes next. "Yes, master," he manages to murmur. He obeys, laying his palms flat against the icy tile in front of him under the showerhead. Nandor's hand brushes against the back of his head and pushes it down, tipping Guillermo's entire body forward till it's bent at an angle from his hips and he can only trust Nandor's grip on his hip and around his thigh to keep him from slipping.

Nandor takes a step forward and drives into Guillermo with his cock. Guillermo's mouth falls open at the overstimulation. He's still soaking wet from his climax, making it easier for Nandor to slip in, but it doesn't mitigate the overwhelming sensation of his vampire filling him up as he impales him. Nandor uses his grip on Guillermo's thigh to pull him closer and sink in all the way to the hilt. Guillermo whimpers this time--high and keening--and quivers around Nandor.

Nandor pulls back and thrusts into him mercilessly. He's chasing his own high, growling low in his throat just barely above the threshold of human hearing, and he seems to derive even greater satisfaction each time he snaps his hips forward and Guillermo gasps and makes little noises of incoherence. Nandor sets an unforgiving pace as he thrusts into his lover again and again. Guillermo doesn't know if he can take any more, but he wants this, he thirsts for more, just like Nandor thirsts for his blood and cannot be satiated. Nandor continues to pound into him from behind. He fucks him straight into the wall, enjoying how Guillermo's hands scrabble against the wet surface for purchase. Without breaking his pace, Nandor bends forward until his chest is flush against the smooth expanse of Guillermo's back, and he finds the round of his shoulder and bares his fangs and bites down without warning.

Guillermo cries out. The sound is barely muted by the sheets of shower water coming down on their bodies. They're slick and panting, sliding against each other, Guillermo shuddering from the weight of his former master on top of him and the arousal of those twin fangs sunken again into his flesh, sucking and pillaging and utterly destroying him.

Guillermo is already approaching his second orgasm when Nandor's thrusts grow uneven. He fucks Guillermo uncontrollably until the climax slams into Guillermo again with the weight of a freight train. As he clenches, sobbing, crying out, Nandor sinks in all the way and spills over the edge with him. The blood loss and unimaginable intensity coursing through Guillermo make his eyelids flutter and his consciousness sway in and out, but not before he registers Nandor pulsing and filling him up with his seed.

Nandor comes to a halt, still inside him, and only then does Guillermo sense the vampire's body over him giving in to the finest of tremors. He gives a last tug at Guillermo's blood and draws his fangs out of the vein in his shoulder. He pulls Guillermo upright with his arms wrapped around his belly and chest, dropping his thigh from where it's braced against the edge of the tub, and slowly pulls out. Guillermo swallows past the dry lump in his throat at the sensation of their mingled wetness oozing out of him and cutting a slow track of warmth down the inside of his leg.

Gently now, almost as if fearing Guillermo will fall over any moment, Nandor turns him around until his back is to the wall of the shower. He picks up the bar of soap again and lathers it over the edges and curves of Guillermo's body, every inch of it, not missing a spot. Guillermo closes his eyes and begins to drift. The tiniest of smiles paints his face as his lover washes him from head to toe, sluices the blood stains from his skin with water, cleans the cum from between his legs.

He wants to ask Nandor why he came back. What changed his mind, moreover, from his stupid fucking chivalry, and made him decide to climb into the shower with him and fuck Guillermo stupid instead.

He doesn't think he has the strength to hold that conversation, though. Or any other conversation, for that matter. He just stands there under the stream of water with his vampire, staring up in sleepy and sated admiration, and the last thing he remembers is looping his arms around Nandor's neck to place a kiss on the tip of his chin before he passes out.

\--

Guillermo comes to disoriented. His body is at an odd angle, reclined somehow as if on a beach chair, and his eyes struggle open to meet the streaks of starlight that his astigmatic eyes can just make out in the dark, open sky above him. The tug of a chill breeze is what finally alerts him to the fact that he is outside on the balcony connected to Silvia’s kitchen by the sliding glass door.

Guillermo groans. He goes to stretch, only to find that he’s pinned down by the weight of a fleece blanket--or two or three--and almost every single muscle in his body is some variation of sore.

Oh, right. They did that.

 _That_ being, fucked in the shower of his mom’s apartment in the middle of the night like a bunch of immortal teenagers.

The sliding door rasps on its dusty track behind Guillermo, and Nandor steps through, impossibly tall and regal, somehow, wrapped up in Vanesa’s fluffy lavender bathrobe that barely comes down far enough to cover his thighs. Guillermo can’t decide if he wants to snort or simply stare at the blurry, half-naked vision of post-shower glow about Nandor. He’s currently still stuck doing the latter when Nandor sets down a plate and cup on the cold glass table between Guillermo’s beach chair and his, and makes a small noise of happiness at finding his human awake.

“Here, so the eyes can see,” he says, and brings Guillermo’s glasses closer to his face and hooks the temples around the human’s ears.

Guillermo lets out a sound between a laugh and a huff at Nandor’s clumsy but endearing attempts to re-spectacle him. Once Nandor draws his hands back and settles into his chair, Guillermo straightens the glasses on his nose and points to the cup on the table between them.

“I’m presuming that’s dishwater?”

“Guillermo,” Nandor chastises him, the perfect picture of loving vampirely offense. “It is nothing but the finest of green teas, taken straight from the human stocking cabinet of dried human foodstuffs and heated in the spinning oven machine to the perfect temperature.” He eyes the cup with a wrinkle of his nose. “Though I do not see what is so green about this tincture.”

That prompts a genuine little laugh from Guillermo, especially when he picks up the teacup and sees the Lipton-brand tag hanging over the lip from the teabag. He gives the drink a blow and a careful sip.

He can’t help himself. He makes a face.

“How much sugar did you put in this? Five cups?”

“Five _cubes_ ,” Nandor corrects him with an airy wave of his hand. “You know, sugar cubes did not exist in my century and my John would have pranced with joy if I could have procured even a handful for him.”

At first Guillermo is about to make a complaint about being compared to a 13th-century war horse barely an hour after having incredibly hot, mind-blowing, blood-letting shower sex, but then he remembers it’s Nandor who’s talking, and instantly all is forgiven. He does press his lips together primly, though, and lower the tea cup into his cozy blanketed lap.

Nandor eyes him with uncertainty. Over the past decade, he hasn’t often let down his mask of self-assuredness around Guillermo, or anyone else, for that matter, but it’s becoming a more frequent occurrence in the past few weeks since their first kiss.

“Is it not delectable enough?” Nandor worries. “There was the package of the pink variety in the cabinet, as well, and I didn’t know what you preferred, so I summoned the image of your face in my mind and thought to myself, yes, green, Guillermo is the type of human to drink green things.”

“It’s fine, master,” Guillermo says, slipping around the old name and not even realizing it. He blinks sleepily in Nandor’s direction. “Really. Thank you.”

Nandor frowns. “You must drink more of it. Colin Robinson has been telling me that the sugar is essential for the restoring of the sweetness and health of one’s human blood when one goes about fainting.”

Guillermo snorts. He’s pretty sure Colin Robinson’s story about fainting has more to do with his diabetic coworker Debra than anything else, and he could point out that the fainting was not his fault but Nandor’s, but he decides to say nothing. Instead, his stupid, eternally lovesick brain decides to melt at the realization that Nandor remembered such a useless but tangentially relevant detail to try to help him.

He really _is_ pathetic, isn’t he.

Nandor is still staring unabashedly at him, so with a grudging toast to the air Guillermo brings the cup back to his lips and sips again. This time around, having expected the full impact of the sugar overload, it doesn’t taste half as gross. He manages to control his facial expression, too, and downs about half of the tea before setting it back down with a clink on the plate on the table.

Of an impulse, Guillermo lifts the edge of the blanket to check underneath. He’s swathed in his cream-colored bathrobe, the same one that he packed in his duffle bag for this trip. His face is awash with sudden heat at the full realization that Nandor must have shut off the shower with one hand while supporting Guillermo’s limp body with the other, and carried him out somehow, both of them soaked to the bone, and found a towel to dry them with and scrounged around in the living room and closets for the blankets and proper attire to cover Guillermo. Guillermo doesn’t know if he should be mortified at the idea of Nandor carrying him out onto the balcony like a baby or completely, utterly besotted.

“I had to cover you quickly, you know, or I might have been tempted to pillage you all over again,” Nandor says behind half-slitted lids. His hands are resting comfortably on either arm of his chair as he lies, almost basking, in the glow of the moonlight.

Guillermo almost chokes on his spit. He is yet entirely unused to Nandor's unguarded comments like this about his attraction to Guillermo's body.

"Maybe I wouldn't have complained," Guillermo says coyly, even as he remembers how sore he already is.

"No, of course you wouldn't, Guillermo, because you would have been unconscious," says Nandor.

Right. Well. Kink negotiations can take priority another time.

At Guillermo's prolonged silence, Nandor lifts his head from the beach chair and opens his eyes. His gaze is ever searching. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," his familiar says automatically.

"Guillermo," Nandor reproaches him. It gives Guillermo pause, at times like this, that the vampire is capable after all of listening to him and what he is or isn't saying. Nandor worries his lip with a fang and then speaks, enunciating slowly, "I am...sorry...if I drank too much and left you very fragile. It's just that you taste so very scrumptious, you see."

Guillermo takes one look at the grimace pasted across Nandor's face, and barks out a surprised laugh so loud he has to slap a hand over his own mouth lest he wake his mother up. The sudden movement sends him into a spiral of wooziness and it takes some time for him to reorient himself.

"This is not very funny, you know!" Nandor complains. "A vampire does not normally apologize to his food!"

Though the comment should be offensive more than anything else, it only makes Guillermo snort and giggle even more. Nandor's right--he never drinks from anyone that he allows to walk free, not that Guillermo has known of in over ten years, at any rate. It goes without saying, then, that Nandor hardly learned to curb his appetite. Guillermo knew this, offering himself to Nandor tonight--he's known it every single time he bares his neck for his master and submits himself to the penetration. There's something so terribly arousing about the danger of it all, the knowledge that this could be his last moment alive as the fangs descend on his flesh, and Nandor could lose control and drain him completely. And yet he trusts that he will still open his eyes to this: to feeling giddy and lightheaded at just having skirted the brink of death.

And a part of him wonders, in a whisper, what might have happened if at any of those times Nandor had indeed drained him.

If he would finally make good on his promise and turn him.

"You are being very quiet," Nandor observes.

"I'm thinking."

"Well, then, your brain is being very slow."

"You literally drank half my life force. Stop complaining."

Nandor lets out a sound like a _pfft_ between his teeth, but his fangs flash all the same in a tiny smile.

"Nandor, why did you come back?"

"I told you, the smell of your blood is very tantalizing. And with you sitting on top of me and rubbing your ass all over my leg while we were on the couch...it was very difficult to focus on hunting, you know."

"Yes, but you were adamant about the whole...not-pillaging-me-while-I'm-grieving thing." Guillermo clears his throat. "Which, for the record, I'm not. Grieving, that is."

Nandor's face is utterly nonplussed. "You are not?"

Guillermo lets his head fall back on the beach chair with a thump. He blinks up slowly at the night sky. "Nope," he says softly, popping his _p_.

“Your father has passed, Guillermo.”

“Yeah,” Guillermo says hoarsely into the night air. “I heard.”

“You are not one to shut out your emotions, Guillermo. Have you been bewitched?”

Guillermo laughs mirthlessly. “Nandor--did I ever tell you what happened when I came out to my dad?”

The question is entirely rhetorical, of course. Nandor doesn’t know. Guillermo never told him. He never told anyone, in fact, not with words, only existed in the memory of what happened together with his mother who witnessed it and Vanesa who heard it from Silvia afterward.

Guillermo wonders idly why he’s not shaking. Why he seems to grow stronger and steadier, in fact, with his hands in a loose grip on the arms of his beach chair, and his vertigo from a minute before has stopped and the celestial bodies above have grounded him: enough to say this.

“He beat me,” Guillermo speaks up to the sky without inflection. “Dragged me around the house by my hair and made me kneel on my Bible. Then he grabbed the crucifix from my wall and he exorcised me with it.”

“Exor…”

“Exorcised,” Guillermo repeats. “Drove the demons out of me. Supposedly.”

The sharp press of the corner of the silver cross against his forehead flashes through Guillermo’s mind. He sifts it through his hands and throws it to the wind. It refuses, like always, to disintegrate the way he expects, but he’s well-practiced at drawing the curtain over the memory, anyway.

“He screamed at me to hold the cross to my forehead and repeat my prayers after him,” Guillermo goes on. “I didn’t want to. So I didn’t. He had some duct tape in the closet--a closet in the spare room, he used it for--anyway. He taped the cross to my forehead and threw me in the closet, basically. I was supposed to kneel and repent while he left me there.”

The space of a breath hangs between him and Nandor.

“I didn’t,” Guillermo says. “I didn’t.” He doesn’t know why he feels the overwhelming need to clarify this to Nandor. Why it matters to either of them, really, but more importantly why it still matters to _him_. 

Only he has known, to this day, what he did in that closet.

Guillermo blinks again at the streaks of light that bend and warp through his lashes in the blackness above. Somehow he knows, without having to roll his head to the side, that Nandor’s eyes are wide open, too.

“You have no demons inside you,” Nandor says slowly. “I would know.”

The bridge of Guillermo’s nose hurts, suddenly. He swallows it down.

He doesn’t tell Nandor about the other things his father screamed at him. He doesn’t admit that the exorcism was the most laughable, the least painful thing of them all. Degrading, yes, and Guillermo knows a part of him that was raised to sit with his legs together and his hands in his lap behind his desk at school still flinched when his father’s voice rose like an incantation to cast the devil from him, but he can almost look back on that scene with a detached and ironic little smile.

He likes to leave it that way. So he doesn’t tell Nandor about how his father vowed to kill him himself to drive the father of lies from his house.

He doesn’t say, either, that he knew at eleven years old, long before he came out, that his father already didn’t love him.

It was one of those family road trips that had become an increasingly frequent source of anxiety for Vanesa and Guillermo. Their father refused to listen to directions, and Silvia was constantly on edge, the both of them ready for verbal spars in Spanglish that usually ended with their father blaming one of the kids or both of them for ‘forgetting’ to bring something and ruining the whole outing.

The topic of the disagreement that day, Guillermo remembers, had meandered to his father’s after-work workouts bicycling by himself around and around the dim parks till he could hit the ten-, the twelve-, the fifteen-mile mark.

“It’s your daughter’s birthday and where are you? Nowhere. Nowhere! Not even a cupcake or a bit of pizza. ¡Qué tipo de jodido padre es ese!”

Guillermo listened, wedged in the back seat, his hand crushed in Vanesa’s fist between them, unable to breathe around the lump in his throat because they were all supposed to be headed to the lake upstate the day after his birthday as a make-up party for the celebration his father missed. He didn’t want the lake outing. He didn’t want his father to remember his birthday anymore, or even his mother, if it meant being stuffed in the back of a muggy car like this with his ears ringing with their voices going at it like that.

“All you know how to do is bike, bike, bike. Can you eat your bike? Can you marry your bike? Tell me, Rodrigo, can you hug and kiss your bike goodnight?”

His father was sullen at the wheel, caught between a sword at his chest and a wall at his back, as he often liked to complain about Silvia.

And then Silvia descended with the one question that still haunts Guillermo to this day.

“Who do you love more, Rodrigo? Your daughter, or your bike?”

Guillermo yanked reflexively at the seatbelt cutting into his neck. It locked automatically, tightened around him, refused to give. No amount of fidgeting could block his ears from his father’s answer.

“My bike. Allí lo tienes, mujer. ¿Estás feliz?”

Guillermo in the present day looks back with a seething hatred in equal measure for both his parents. Eleven-year-old Guillermo cried out in his heart that his father must have been provoked--that his mother was nothing short of stupid to ask that question--but thirty-year-old Guillermo knows in the depths of him that no father in his right mind would blurt out that answer even sarcastically. Still, the rage that stirs in Guillermo at his mother for having dragged him and his fragile, unsuspecting eleven-year-old self by the heel into a fight he never wanted to be part of, continues to spill out of him, hot and heavy and uncontainable. And no matter how many times Guillermo practices his smile in the mirror and opens his arms to embrace Silvia with dimpled greetings and gazes across a dusty coffee table at the rumpled, half-proud version of herself that his mother has become, the pity and the duty inside him can never surpass the anger that has clawed its way into his chest and there in the cavernous emptiness has made its home.

He only wishes he knew why his father stopped loving him. Where the twinkle in his eyes went, why he stopped looking at him like a colorblind man’s first sunset, why that answer drew itself so easily from his lips when Guillermo had never done anything wrong except to be secretly born a boy.

Guillermo’s thoughts tangle like a swirl of water down the shower drain. He doesn’t say any of these things to Nandor now. Some things, he thinks, are not for saying. Not ever. Not aloud.

“You’re tired,” Nandor observes quietly.

“I’m not,” says Guillermo.

“You don’t tell the truth very often, I suspect, Guillermo.”

Guillermo rolls his head to the side then to meet Nandor’s gaze with a roguish grin that feels like it’s about to split his brittle ribs down the middle. “What makes you think that?”

Nandor doesn’t know how to respond to that. This isn’t the first time Guillermo has met his gentle reproaches with unexpectedly sharp rejoinders of his own, wrapped up in his unique brand of nonchalance, but it’s one of the first times where it matters to Nandor that he knows how to respond to him.

“I don’t know what to say,” Nandor enunciates slowly.

“What are you talking about?”

“You were grieving, so I said, I would leave you alone in peace. Then you were angry with me, even though you did not say it, yes, I could sense it, so I came back. Because truthfully, I never wanted to leave, and I desired you so very intimately. And I thought afterward, yes, this was what you needed. But then here you are, and you are thinking again and looking angry, and you say you are not grieving but I know the signs better than anyone that that is a lie.”

Guillermo clenches his jaw and shrinks back.

“I…” Nandor struggles around the words in his mouth. “Guillermo, I...want to...help you. But I don’t know how.”

Guillermo’s eyes are stinging. “I don’t need your help.”

Nandor rocks back with an unspoken _oh_.

“I’m fine,” Guillermo amends. “We’re fine. There’s nothing to fix here.”

The vampire just continues to stare at him in stony silence.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Guillermo asks him, for the first time a tinge of desperation creeping into his face. “Nandor?”

“Nothing,” says Nandor. “As you said. You don’t need my help. There’s nothing to fix.”

And then before Guillermo can even react, Nandor stands, ridiculous bathrobe and all, and snaps his jaw shut and morphs into bat form to plunge off the railing of the balcony and into the murky night.

**Author's Note:**

> ...Look, I _can_ promise the second part will have some resolutions, but I did coast to a nice resting point at the end of this scene and I _am_ just a tiny bit evil, so...
> 
> If you've been following this series, then you probably know from my author's notes that Guillermo's story is closely inspired by personal anecdotes from my own (disastrous) coming out. It's also turned into a way for me to process my feelings about my own childhood and my relationship with my father. Painful as it is, if you've read this far, I hope some part of this piece has maybe helped you, too.
> 
> Coming up next: Guillermo sets out writing his eulogy on his own; important and long-overdue conversations are had with Vanesa; she reveals something about their father that he never knew before; Nandor comes back at an unexpected moment; and Guillermo tries, perhaps succeeds, perhaps fails, to find his closure.
> 
> I would go FERAL for any and all kinds of feedback. Feel free to comment down below! It could be a word! Fifty words! I cherish them all! <3 -kaleb
> 
> my socials:  
> my tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> my insta: kc.barrie


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